Sectarian Attacks Kill Dozens in Baghdad

Friday

Jun 29, 2007 at 5:25 AM

The attacks were days ahead of a planned march of devout Shiites through Sunni heartlands to the remnants of a revered shrine.

BAGHDAD, June 28 — A spate of grisly attacks believed to have been carried out by Sunni Arab militants killed dozens of Shiites around Baghdad, just days ahead of a planned huge march of devout Shiites through Sunni heartlands to the remnants of a revered shrine.

A rush-hour bombing Thursday morning killed 25 people in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Baya in southwest Baghdad, where the Mahdi Army militia has escalated violence against Sunnis, an Interior Ministry official said. Ten people were killed in a bombing Wednesday night in the mostly Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya in northwestern Baghdad. And the police reported finding 20 decapitated bodies — a hallmark of Sunni extremists — south of the capital, although other officials later disputed the account.

The attacks took place ahead of the rally called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who had urged Shiites to march to Samarra next week to protest the recent bombing that destroyed the twin golden minarets of the city’s Askariya shrine. The shrine’s dome was demolished in a bombing last year that unleashed a storm of sectarian killings.

Mr. Sadr’s office in Najaf urged Iraqis of all sects to use the protest “to get close to each other and break all the barriers installed by the Takfiris and the occupation,” a reference to Sunni extremists and the American military.

Clearly concerned that thousands of Shiites marching north of Baghdad would be an obvious target for attack, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s cabinet on Thursday urged a delay, bluntly admitting that the route to Samarra was not safe and that time was needed to “cleanse it of terrorists.”

Mr. Maliki also claimed that confessions from insurgents arrested in Iraq have revealed that the Sunni group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is looking to export “wide-ranging and dangerous plans” to neighboring countries.

“Al Qaeda is surrounded and is suffering heavy blows in Iraq, and so elements from it are fleeing to other countries where it is easier to infiltrate, and opening new battles to conceal its losses,” he said during a visit to an Iraqi counterterrorism headquarters.

The worst attack in Baghdad on Thursday struck commuters at the Baya bus station. The police said a bomb in a parked car exploded there just after 8 a.m. Buses were set ablaze as bystanders rushed to the scene, where 25 people were killed and at least 50 wounded, the police said.

The neighborhood is at the heart of a sectarian battleground where Shiites from the Mahdi Army, a loosely organized group loyal to Mr. Sadr, have redoubled efforts to drive out Sunnis and take control of southwest Baghdad.

After the blast, Mahdi Army fighters surrounded the area along with Iraqi soldiers and policemen, and they set up checkpoints to search vehicles entering the neighborhood through side roads, avoiding the American patrols on larger thoroughfares.

As one Iraqi reporter for The New York Times arrived at a Mahdi Army checkpoint, 20 fighters milled about and inspected vehicles. On the next road over, a group of American Humvees approached. “The Americans are coming!” one of the militiamen shouted. The fighters then walked away, blending into crowds already outside who were heading to the blast site.

Nearby, Iraqi national policemen in camouflage uniforms cursed Sunnis. “We are going to finish you!” one of them shouted, to no one in particular.

Residents said Mahdi Army fighters stopped people after the blast and demanded to see identification cards to determine whether they had Shiite or Sunni names. Some residents said the checks were intended to keep out other Sunni attackers, but others said the militia was scouring the area for Sunnis to take revenge upon. The bodies of two recently killed middle-aged men were found hours later in Amel, a neighborhood nearby, but the victims’ sects were not known.

Contradicting the Iraqi authorities, the American military reported a toll of only 13 dead and 20 wounded in the bombing. The military described the blast as a “suicide car-bomb detonation” as opposed to a bomb in a parked, unattended car, and said that the police believed that 40 vehicles had been damaged. The military also said an American soldier was killed and another wounded in an unrelated bomb attack in eastern Baghdad on Thursday.

The discovery of 20 headless bodies was made in the Om-Obaid village near the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad, according to a police official in nearby Madaen. A half-dozen heads were also found near the still-clothed bodies, which appeared to be of men of varying ages, he said. An Interior Ministry official asserted later that it was doubtful that bodies had in fact been found.

The area is largely Sunni Arab, with many residents from the Dulaimi and Jabouri tribes. And it is in a region that for the past year has received little attention from American forces but is now a focus of the military’s efforts to smash Sunni extremists’ supply lines into Baghdad and to kill and capture insurgents who fled the troop buildup in the capital.

The Wednesday night attack in Kadhimiya struck people strolling in front of supermarkets, ice cream parlors and other shops at sunset. The blast left pools of blood and shards of glass scattered inside and outside the shops and on the sidewalk.

“The aim was to kill as many civilians as possible, because it is a Shia area,” said Khadim Muhammad, a 19-year-old who owns an ice cream parlor nearby. He said that if had he not been at home preparing ingredients, “I would have been dead.”

Fifteen unidentified bodies were found scattered around Baghdad on Thursday, an Interior Ministry official said. Four people were killed by a car bomb near a gasoline station in the Mansour neighborhood, while 11 people were wounded when a volley of mortar shells fell on the Shorja market in central Baghdad, the official added.

In southern Iraq, three British soldiers were killed Thursday by a roadside bomb in Basra that hit their resupply patrol shortly after midnight. A British military spokesman said the soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device while they were on foot during a patrol of armored vehicles traveling between Basra Palace and the city’s airport, the only two major British bases left in the southern city.

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